12 Terms to Know If Your Child Struggles With Reading

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If your child struggles with reading issues or dyslexia, you may be unfamiliar with the lingo you’re hearing. Here are some key terms to help you take an active role in conversations about your child’s reading issues.

Decoding

The ability to sound out letters and words. As readers learn which symbols (letters) are associated with certain sounds, they can start to make sense of printed words and translate them to speech. Decoding or “sounding out” a new word is sometimes called “word attack.”

Fluency

The ability to read sentences correctly and quickly, without having to stop and decode every word. This leap in processing enables readers to focus on the meaning of a passage of text. Fluency is key to reading comprehension.

Multisensory structured language education

A common way to teach reading and spelling that engages the senses of sight, sound, motion and touch. Multisensory approaches emphasize how a letter or word looks and sounds. Instruction includes what your lips and tongue need to do to produce particular sounds and what your arms and hands need to do to write each letter of the alphabet. Multisensory structured language (MSSL) programs also explicitly teach the structure of the English language in terms of grammar and meaning.

Orton–Gillingham

In the early 20th century, Dr. Samuel Orton, a neuropsychiatrist and pathologist, and Anna Gillingham, an educator and psychologist, introduced a multisensory structured approach to teaching people with dyslexia. Orton-Gillingham is the foundation for many programs used today.

Phoneme

Phonemic awareness

Noticing and identifying individual sounds in spoken words. Readers who are aware of the different phonemes in a word can start putting them together (“b-a-t” becomes bat). This is called phonemic blending. Readers can also move in the opposite direction and break a word into different phonemes (pulling apart bat into “b-a-t”). This is called phonemic segmentation.

Phonological processing

Distinguishing between different sounds within words. Children who struggle with this may leave out key sounds (saying boom instead of broom) or substitute some sounds for others (saying tat instead of cat). Difficulties with phonological processing are common in young children, but continuing difficulties can present many challenges by the second or third grade.

Rapid automated naming

The ability to name colors, pictures, objects or letters rapidly, in a sequence. Variations in rapid automated naming (RAN) are thought to predict abilities in letter recognition, word recognition and recalling the sounds of letters.

Beginning around third or fourth grade, your child is expected to be able to read a passage of text, understand it and answer questions about it. Here are the five skills needed for reading comprehension.

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